Cogitas Ergo Sum

In my last posting I mentioned ‘Ruminations’ which is a spiral bound collection of finalised versions of some of the more, for want of a better description, philosophical items that I have produced recently for this blog. As an integral part of this composition there are a number of accompanying images a few of which I intend to post in separate brief items here.

The first of these is a sketch that I came across many years ago – decades ago in fact. I have no remaining record of the source of this intriguing drawing and as far as I can recall it did not have a title attached to it. So for my own purposes I called it ‘Cogitas Ergo Sum’ which, if my feeble Latin suffices translates as ‘You think therefore I am’.

This is for very interesting reasons that I think are there to be seen, as it were, inspired of course by Descartes’ famous philosophical proposition of 1637 ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think therefore I am’ which implies that an ‘I’ exists to do the thinking.

But, you may wish to consider, can we take a further step towards identifying the presence of entities that we think about other than ‘I’? Probably not in the strict terms that were laid down by Descartes, but if people act as if such an entity has an existential standing then in so doing they effectively imbue it with power and creativity in our world so that its status is in at least in one important respect equivalent to existence. Since we come across this phenomenon every day, we should at least ensure that we use it for the better.

Other substantial questions around the Cogitas ergo sum idea will remain of course, perhaps notable amongst these is this: ‘Who is the speaker and who is ‘I’? A fruitful question to contemplate - I think.